mouse and sound choppy

[CarolJoy]

My mouse has turned choppy and often doesn't work for a few seconds. I have been having challenges with skipping on You Tube. today it is skipping on medical transcription reports. I have Gateway GT5628 running Vista Home Premium. Had some fan noise and lubricated the ball bearing and that is solved. My foot pedal for the MT work often continues when I raise my foot. It stops when it feels like it. The sound is getting choppy there. I am running a McAfee scan as I write this. I tried to change the batteries in the mouse to no avail. I downloaded Fly Player add on for Mozilla Firefox. I ran Spybot and am clean there. Not sure what to do here. I am backed up with Carbonite so hopefully I have safe in that regard. Any help to be offered here? I sure appreciate it. I am a bit better than a novice but certainly no expert. I am just frustrated as I am having difficulty getting my work done today.

[Rik from RCE]

hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc and have a look at Task Manager to see if a process is eating up processor time. If that is happening, let me know what the process is.

[CarolJoy]

The biggest hog I see is Firefox. At 83,020 K. Win mail is 38,184. Explorer is 53,248 and then dwm.exe is 35,892, teatimer.exe 34,940 and sidebar, exe 22,296. I turned off the sidebar.
I had put in a new foot pedal thinking that might be part of the challenge. Still giving me fits. I have run Spybot and all is clear there. Adaware found something and I am making a restore point and getting rid of that. McAfee is still running a scan. Nothing there so far. I plan to defrag and disk check for errors.
Hope I have given you info you need.

[Suspishio]

Rik means CPU usage rather than memory. What would I do?

1. What Rik suggested

2. Clean the mouse's optical sensor

3. Attach a USB or PS2 mouse & see what happens

[CarolJoy]

Remember, I am also having challenges with choppiness (is that a word?) on YouTube and playing transcription with a foot pedal from a software program. Not just my mouse. I will try your USB suggestion. May not be for awhile today though.
I have cleaned with Adaware, CC cleaner, disk cleaner, Spybot, McAfee. I have rebooted and the mouse is OK right now. Haven't tried to do dictation yet though. That is next.

[Suspishio]

Then there's Rik's important suggestion. What's hogging your CPU?

[CarolJoy]

OK, I am now lost. Did I not give you what you wanted in task manager? Sounds like I didn't. Where in there do I find what you need? I am above novice but don't always feel that way. Right now I am running smooth with the mouse and foot pedal. Haven't tried You Tube though. Where do I find CPU? Thanks bunches.

[Rik from RCE]

Look at processes in task manager, there is a column called CPU. It shows what percentage of the CPU's time each process is using.

[kaninelupus]

Beyond the CPU suggestion, may simply be a memory issue (or given YouTube misbehaving, may relate insufficient video memory)
How much RAM do you have installed? (this will actually put info from next question into perspective)
Looking again to Task Manager, what is the total Physical Memory usage (listed right down the bottom of the Task Manager console as a percentage)?
Also, what Video Card do you have installed? Quality of this component will define just how much of the visual memory load is being handled by the GPU as opposed to your CPU and memory. Now this one a little less likely, so not jumping to conclusions at this point, but easier to get this bit of info now rather than later.

[Suspishio]

Thing is, the OP says it's just started to happen. So what's changed?

Could the new add-in for that wretched FireFox be a problem? Did the last Tuesday (25-Aug) Windows update do any wrecking?

Choppiness on the mouse is usually caused by an interrupt taking priority over something else. Could be a device sharing the mouse IRQ. Could be the Kernal coming in to service a roll-in/out as per kaninelupus' suggestion.

Could be Bluetooth/Wireless interrupts - maybe a new Bluetooth/Wireless device in range, which is why I suggested turning the wireless/Bluetooth off and using a wired mouse to rule out that possibility.

You have the advantage of being in front of the PC and we have the disadvantage of only seeing what you tell us. Soinformation is everything in order to help you.

[dryeric]

I have a Gateway GM5661E which began displaying the same effect sometime in the last few weeks. With nothing running other than antivirus, when moving the mouse across the screen it sticks somewhere in the middle, then catch up after a second or so. It is very difficult to get the mouse to settle onto a button. I verified that the mouse works fine on another machine. After some other failed troubleshooting (video card, windows update), i did a full factory reset (hard drive wipe) to eliminate any potential software issues. The choppy mouse effect was seen after the recovery, before and after windows update, and at all steps in the recovery process where the mouse could be used. I believe my problem must be a hardware or bios issue. I thought it might be a heat issue as my CPU fan was erratically changing speeds, so i replaced the heatsink and CPU fan and set a box fan to blow on the computer to no avail.
Could a failure in one of the memory modules cause this type of behavior? Any ideas?